Accountability

For this section, we would like to address accountability in three ways: (1) the accountability culture of schools (particularly involving high-stakes testing, prescribed curricula, scientifically-based models, current and anticipated applications of the Common Core Standards, etc.), (2) how we should hold society accountable for children and schools, and (3) how we should hold ourselves accountable in terms of our research.

Below are the quote choices for the Accountability Section of the book. Feel free to add additional quotes. We've noted which quotes have been selected within the table. If you see a quote you would like to use that has not been selected, then please put your name in the respondent column and then email us to let us know which quote you have selected. Thank you.

Current number of additional entries possible in this section: 6

"Familiarity breeds contempt, but it also breeds something like affection. . . It is possible for the mind to develop interest in a routine or mechanical procedure if conditions are continually supplied which demand the mode of operation and preclude any other sort" (Child and Curriculum, 288) Anderson Allen

It is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment. (Democracy and Education, MW 9:24-25) Hlebowitsh

Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought. This process is art . . . Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation. (The Public and its Problems, pp. 183 - 184) Kyle Greenwalt

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. . . . Any experience is miseducative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. . . . A given experience may increase a person's automatic skill in a particular direction and yet tend to land him in a groove or rut; the effect again is to narrow the field of further experience. (Dewey, 1938, Experience and Education, pp. 25–26) Patrick M. Jenlink


Additional Quotes on Accountability

	Quote	Source	Respondent
A01	Here we have the basis of moral responsibility or accountability. There is no responsibility or accountability. There is no responsibility for any result which is not intended or foreseen. Such a consequence is only physical, not moral. (Sec. VII) But when any result has been foreseen, and adopted as foreseen, such result is the outcome not of any external circumstance, nor of mere desires and impulses, but of the agent’s conception of his own end. Now, because the result thus flows from the agent’s own conception of an end, he feels himself responsible for it	EW 3:342
A02	Our freedom lies in the capacity to alter our mode of action through having our ignorance enlightened by being held for the neglected consequences when brought to accountability by others, or by holding ourselves accountable in subsequent reflection. Cases of careless acts and of acts omitted through negligence are thus crucial for any theory of freedom and responsibility.	MW 5:416
A03	The increased interdependence of men, through travel and transportation, collective methods of production, and crowding of populations in cities, has widened the area of harm likely to result from inconsiderate action, and has strengthened the belief that adequate thoughtfulness is possible only where there is sympathetic interest in others.”	MW 5:417
A04	If one compares the pains taken to secure , record, and make publically available every item of astronomical experience with the scanty and almost accidental methods of keeping track of and utilizing the varied results of educational experimentation, one readily sees the chief source of the backwardness of educational science	How We Think MW 6:453
A05	Educational experimentation in the narrower sense refers to changes made not so much for the sake of improving specific and detailed results as for the sake of throwing light on some educational problem	How We Think MW 6:453
A06	For the latter purpose (scientific experimentation) special EXPERIMENTAL SCHOOLS (q.v.) are absolutely indispensible. Their results are less quantitative, seemingly less accurate, and less scientific, just because they are dealing with matters educationally much more important.	How We Think MW 8:453
A07	So far as the stimulation and guidance of reflective thought are concerned, school conditions leave much to be desired. They are much better adapted to the acquisition of a body of fixed information than to investigating operations of inference, discovery, and proving.	How We Think MW 6:456
A08	No mode of action can, as we have insisted, give anything approaching absolute certitude; it provides insurance, but no assurance.	Quest for Certainty LW 4:27
A09	Many, perhaps most, errors in physical inference arise from taking as data things that are not data for the problem in hand; they undoubtedly exist, but they are not the evidence that is demanded.	Quest for Certainty LW 4:143	Sebastián Díaz
A10	Were we to define science not in the usual technical way, but as a knowledge that accrues when methods are employed which deal competently with problems that present themselves, the physician, engineer, artist, craftsman, lay claim to scientific knowing. . . . They rest upon the idea that known objects exist as the consequences of directed operations, not because of conformity of thought or observation of something antecedent.	Quest for Certainty LW 4:159
A11	It is in this sense that all knowledge as such is instrumental. The beginning and the end are things of gross everyday experience. But apart from knowledge the things of our ordinary experience are fragmentary, casual, unregulated by purpose, full of frustrations and barriers.	Quest for Certainty LW 4:174
A12	Tendency to premature judgment, jumping at conclusions, excessive love of simplicity, making over of evidence to suit desire, taking the familiar for the clear, etc., all spring from confusing the feeling of certitude with a certified situation.	Quest for Certainty LW 4:181	Julian Vasquez Heilig
A13	Love for security, translated into a desire not to be disturbed and unsettled, leads to dogmatism, to acceptance of beliefs upon authority, to intolerance and fanaticism on one side and to irresponsible dependence and sloth on the other.	Quest for Certainty LW 4: 181-182
A14	As long as the isolation of knowledge and practice holds sway, this division of aims and dissipation of energy, of which the state of education is typical, will persist. The effective condition of the integration of all divided purposes and conflicts of belief is the realization that intelligent action is the sole ultimate resource of mankind in every field whatsoever.	Quest for Certainty LW 4: 201
A15	A third significant change that would issue from carrying over experimental method from physics to man concerns the import of standards, principles, rules. With the transfer, these, and all tenets and creeds about good and goods, would be recognized to be hypotheses. Instead of being rigidly fixed, they would be treated as intellectual instruments to be tested and confirmed – and altered – through consequences effected by acting upon them. They would lose all pretense of finality – the ulterior source of dogmatism.	Quest for Certainty LW 4: 221
A16	Now a genuine principle differs from a rule in two ways: (a) A principle evolves in connection with the course of experience, being a generalized statement of what sort of consequences and values tend to be realized in certain kinds of situations; a rule is taken as something ready-made and fixed. (b) A principle is primarily intellectual, a method and scheme for judging, and is practical secondarily because of what it discloses; a rule is primarily practical.	Ethics, 304-305
A17	A human being is held accountable in order that he may learn; in order that he may learn not theoretically and academically but in such a way as to modify and – to some extent – remake his prior self.	Ethics, 337	Tuel
A18	There is no inherent principle of retributive justice that commands and justifies the use of reward and punishment independently of their consequences in each specific case. . . . Now the consequence which is most important is that which occurs in personal attitude: confirmation of a good habit, change in a bad tendency.	Ethics, 338
A19	In the degree in which we become aware of possibilities of development and actively concerned to keep the avenues of growth open, in the degree in which we fight against induration and fixity, and thereby realize the possibilities of recreation of our selves, we are actually free.	Ethics, 340
A20	To remain in power a dominant class must at least seem to the mass to represent and sustain the interests which they themselves prize. There is thus added to the conflict of the old and established class with the inferior but developing group, the conflict of values that are generally accepted with those which are coming into being. This for a time takes the form of a struggle between a majority conserving the old, and a minority interested in the generation of something new, in progress	Ethics, 361
A21	Can the teacher ever receive “obligatory prescriptions”? Can he receive from another a statement of the means by which he is to reach his ends, and not become hopelessly servile in his attitude?. . . . Can a passive, receptive attitude on the part of the instructor (suggesting the soldier awaiting orders from a commanding general) be avoided, unless the teacher, as a student of psychology himself sees the reasons and import of the suggestions and rules that are proffered him?	Psychology and Social Practice MW 1: 137
A22	The function of the supervisor is important and valuable. Obviously, it should be one of inspiration and of education, rather than that of simply writing prescriptions such as those the doctor writes, and which are then handed to a drug-store clerk to fill out. Teachers should not be clerks filling out recipes that are prescribed by others.	The Classroom Teacher MW 15:187	Gershon
A23	A good deal of supervision,. . . seems to have a great deal of “super” in it and not much of “vision.” It is the business of the supervisor to look over the field, to get a larger, wider, more thorough view of it than the conditions of the classroom teacher can permit.	The Classroom Teacher MW 15:187
A24	Finally, I saw how inconsistent it was to expect this greater amount of creative, independent work from the student when the teachers were still unemancipated; when the teachers were still shackled by too many rules and prescriptions and too much of a desire for uniformity of method and subject matter.	The Classroom Teacher, MW 15:188	Allison
A25	We may look forward, therefore, to a society in which teachers are fairly secure and truly fee. We can hope that they will be encouraged to attack professional problems in a creative spirit. We foresee the kind of administration which exalts the free and intelligent personality and does not depend upon rules, regulations, formal procedures, and prescriptions.	The Forward View: A Free Teacher in a Free Soceity LW 11:547
A26	What we do today in revising curriculum, studying psychology, preparing a lesson, educating a teacher, addressing a group of parents, or passing a resolution in our organization of teachers will take us a little nearer to, or remove us farther from, the practices which have here been envisioned for a free teacher in a free society.	The Forward View: A Free Teacher in a Free Soceity LW 11:547